• Diff for "TarBall"

In computing, the tar file format is a type of archive file format: the *T*ape *AR*chive format. These files are produced by the ["Unix"] command tar and were standardized by POSIX.1-1998 and later POSIX.1-2001.

It is used widely to archive and unarchive files, which means to accumulate a large collection of files into a single archive file (packer), while preserving FileSystem information such as user and group permissions, dates, and ["directory"] structures.

Commonly a tar file is referred to as a tarball . Tarballs are ["source"] code, not binary ["image"] DebianPackage s. DebianPackage s can be downloaded and installed using ?AptGet .

In the Unix philosophy of "one job, one program", it does not support compression directly. If you then want to compress your archive, you use a separate program that is specialised in compression. tar is most commonly used in tandem with an external compression utility such as ["gzip"] or ["bzip2"], since it has no built in data compression facilities. These compression utilities generally only compress a single file, hence the pairing with tar, which can produce a single file from many files.

Filename extension

• .tar , for tar file.
• .tar.gz or .tgz (only when compressed by gzip)
• .tar.bz2 or .tbz (only when compressed by bzip2)

MIME-Type

• application/x-tar

Installation of tar.gz Files

After unpacking and uncompressing as ["root"] with

• tar -zxvf nameof.tar.gz

(this command above is the equivalent of unzip in windows)

the installation procedure is the standard GNU one:

$ ./configure

$ ["make"]

$ make install

You usually can do configure and make as a regular user and make install as root

See also:

• [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tarball Wikipedia article about tarball].

• *.["dsc"] (another source code file type).

• FileRoller in DebianGnome, that can uncompress and unpack files.

CategoryRedundant: ["targz"]